Whatever Marlon was saying, it struck home keenly enough that Yuxia had to pull the van over to the side of the road and weep silently for a few moments. Csongor simultaneously felt grateful for Marlon’s acuity and sad about its effect on poor Yuxia.
But just as Csongor was taking advantage of this uncharacteristic moment of weakness on his driver’s part by making another grab for the door handle, he was slammed back against his seat by powerful acceleration as she gunned the van forward.
Marlon shouted something at her, and Csongor could guess its meaning: What the hell are you doing?
All of this violent stopping and starting had made Csongor nervous about an accidental discharge of the pistol. He felt for its safety lever and flicked it.
Marlon switched to English and looked at Csongor. “I would like to get out of the car.”
“Fine,” Csongor said. He shoved the Makarov into a cargo pocket on his trousers, then made yet another grab for the door handle.
“I thought you wanted to help the girl who saved your ass,” Yuxia said, with a wicked glance over her shoulder.
“I do,” Marlon said. “Maybe in a way that doesn’t suck.”
Csongor had managed to get the van’s side door open. Marlon lurched to his feet, crouching low to avoid gouging his scalp on the jagged metal of the van’s torn roof. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone and its battery, which he jacked back together. This he dropped into the cup holder next to Yuxia. In the same motion he grabbed Yuxia’s phone and battery, which Csongor had left sitting there, and stuffed those into his pocket. Yuxia, bowing to the inevitable, allowed the van to slow down. Marlon spun around on one foot, passing in front of Csongor, and reached down into the open bag and grabbed a small cash-brick. He raised this to his face and clenched it between his teeth, then backed out of the van, slapping the seat next to Csongor as he half fell out. He tumbled and rolled in the dust on the side of the road and then fell away to aft as Yuxia gunned the vehicle forward.
Csongor noticed that one of the two stun grenades was now missing. He picked up the remaining one and put it into his jacket pocket. He had lost track of where they were: moving down a woebegone street lined with small businesses that all seemed to have something to do with marine stuff: knowledge he gained not by careful observation but through momentary glimpses and reeks of sparks, smoke, fish, turpentine, gas. But then they crossed an invisible plane into some other property, and the buildings fell away to reveal a clear path to the pier. The taxi still waited and the boat was almost there.
JONES COULD NOT show himself outside of the taxi, and so they sat, engine running, for several minutes, watching the boat approach. The taxi driver was motionless, staring straight ahead, sweat running from beneath his short haircut and trickling down the back of his neck. Zula was aware, of course, that between the two of them, they might be able to overpower Jones, or at least belabor him to the point where the taxi driver might be able to run away and summon help. But that would require some communication between the two of them — which, with Jones sitting right there listening, would have been impossible even if they’d had a language in common.
The boat glided up along the end of the pier and cut its engines. Its pilot had judged matters perfectly and so it eased to a stop directly before them. The difference in altitude between pier surface and boat deck was only a few feet: a minor obstacle, it seemed, for three men who scrambled up onto the pier and walked up to meet the taxi. One of them came alongside the driver’s-side door and let the driver see the grip of a pistol projecting from the pocket of his trousers. Then he gave a little toss of the head that meant Get out. The driver popped his door latch, and the gunman pulled it open. Moving in fits and starts, the driver pivoted on his seat, got his feet on the ground, looked up at the gunman for his next cue.
A second man flanked the door on the passenger’s side. The third came round and opened Jones’s door and greeted him in Arabic. Jones responded in kind while groping for Zula’s hand. He interlaced his fingers with hers and then scooted toward the door, pulling her along as he went.
Getting on that boat — which was obviously what would happen next — seemed like an overwhelmingly bad idea to Zula. She gripped the doorside handle with her free hand, anchoring herself there, and refused to be pulled out.
Jones paused on the threshold and looked back at her. “Yes, we can do it kicking and screaming. There are four of us. Someone might notice, might summon the PSB. The PSB might respond and might get here in time to get a good enough look at yonder boat that they could distinguish it from the thousands of other boats just like it. But you should understand, Zula, that this is a close-run affair. Narrow margins. We can only afford so many unwilling passengers. If you don’t let go of that fucking handle and come nicely, we will shove the taxi driver into the trunk of his vehicle and push it into the water.”
Zula let go of the door handle and gripped Jones’s hand. She slid sideways across the seat until she had reached the place where she could rotate on her bottom and get her feet aimed out the door. Jones was strong and she learned that she could rely on his grip. She got her other hand wrapped around his forearm and then executed a sort of chin-up to get her feet clear of the taxi. As she rose to a standing position on the surface of the pier, she glimpsed his face, gazing, not so much in amazement as simple curiosity, at something that was approaching them from the road.
At that moment — for the brain worked in funny ways — Zula suddenly recognized him as Abdallah Jones, a big-time international terrorist. She’d read about him in newspapers.
Following the gaze of Abdallah Jones, Zula turned her head just in time to see a van come roaring in and crash into the rear bumper of the taxi.
SOKOLOV TOOK INVENTORY. In combat there was this tendency to divest oneself of objects at astonishing speed, which was why he and all others in his line of work tended to attach the really important things to their bodies. Less than an hour ago, in the cellar of the apartment building, he had shed his retired Chinese angler costume and changed into a black tracksuit, black trainers, hard-shell knee pads, an athletic supporter with a plastic cup to protect his genitals, and a belt with the Makarov holster and some spare clips. A bulky windbreaker covered a black vest-cum-web-harness from which he had hung a variety of knives, lights, zip ties, and other things he thought he might need. On his back was a CamelBak pouch full of water. Why carry water on a mission that was supposed to last only fifteen minutes? Because once in Afghanistan he had gone out on a fifteen-minute mission that had ended up lasting forty-eight hours, and when he had made it back to his base, having remained barely alive by drinking his own urine and sucking the blood of rodents and small birds, he had made a vow that he would never be without water again.
He unknotted the garbage bag of stuff he had taken from the office. He had to move in tiny increments lest it become obvious, to the people in the crowd all around him, that there was a living creature underneath the carter’s tarp. He felt around inside the bag and identified the miscellany of heavy electronic boxes and then found the soft and squishy leather purse.
Most of the purse’s contents were of zero to minimal usefulness. As an example, there was a condom, which he considered fitting over the muzzle of his Makarov to keep dirt out of the barrel, but there was little point in doing so now. He did, however, find a wallet with a government identity card bearing a photo that more or less matched the face of the Russian-speaking, Chinese-looking woman — the spy — he had seen in the office. And so here was a case in which a seemingly trivial aspect of the women’s fashion industry had profound consequences, at least for Sokolov. For a man would have carried the contents of this wallet on his person and would have departed with them. But women’s clothes made no allowances for such things, so it all had to go in the purse.